


I'll Feel For You (Some Days You'll Feel For Me Too)

by coldhope, luninosity



Series: Feeling Strangely Fine [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: And Also Shooting Robots, Before They Can Shoot Steve, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Bucky Barnes Returns, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Mission Fic, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Bucky Barnes, Reunions, Robots, Watching Over Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-24 12:25:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2581382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope, https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What the <i>hell,"</i> Bucky says, "get <i>down,</i> Steve, you idiot--!" and puts three rounds neatly into three robot attackers Steve hadn't even heard approaching. They fall down and short out and spit sparks. And, oh God, Bucky's here, turning up out of nowhere, and <i>Bucky.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Feel For You (Some Days You'll Feel For Me Too)

**Author's Note:**

> The prequel to [When You Save Me (I've Got Nothin' Left To Sigh For)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2567624); this is what we got excited and wrote in the comments, about when Bucky first showed up to save Steve, because that's what Bucky's mission has always been, saving Steve.
> 
> Title for this story from Semisonic's "I'll Feel For You;" series title is the title of a Semisonic album, because it felt right.

It's a mission that should've been easy but isn't, because that's how the world goes these days; it's a mission that burns and sears inside Steve's bones because every second he's helping the Avengers clean out a nest of murderous robots in San Francisco is another second he's not looking for Bucky. It's a mission that shouldn't even need Captain America except Steve had followed hints of HYDRA presence and subsequent wiped-out HYDRA presence to tunnels beneath the bay, and _then_ there'd been a robot uprising, because of _course._

They're Zola's robots. Steve is decidedly angry about this. No long-dead computerized Nazi mastermind's going to get in the way of him finding Bucky.

He punches a robot in the face, mostly to make himself feel better. Doesn't work.

Over on his left, Thor's happily electrocuting metallic legions. Tony's distracting some that've built themselves wings. Lots of robots. Lots of places to express pent-up frustration. Steve is technically off the clock here, on leave, gone dark, whatever terminology applies to Captain America, but: murderous robots. He couldn't say no.

Absentmindedly, he catches the shield when it comes spinning back. Uses it to block a few electric-bolt discharges from robot gun-arms. Thinks about Bucky and metal arms and Zola, grits his teeth, and stops thinking because that hurts worse than the sizzle of lightning crisping hairs along his forearm.

 _Lots_ of robots. Ground fighting not going well. Position getting overrun. Well, that's just fine, Steve's never backed down from a challenge, and he digs his heels into a hilly San Francisco street and glares down electronic eyes. Bring it on, and he'll barrel through every last one of them if it'll get him out of here and back on Bucky's trail.

"Cap!" Tony says from above, sounding unusually alarmed. "Behind you!"

There's an overturned trolley behind him, or there should be; Steve spins around and realizes that, hey, robots there too, swarming upward. Not to mention the ones now behind him, which'd been the ones in front of him until a second ago, and the tell-tale crackle of electricity scorches the air--

An explosion. Big. Fiery. Steve's ears are ringing. Grenade? Who on their current team carries grenades? His shoulder aches from being slammed into the hapless wheels-up trolley.

He shoves himself upright with the help of the shield. Blinks through the haze of dust and robot body-parts.

A figure. Black and silver.

A face. Steve knows that face. Steve will always forever permanently unquestionably know that face. Those eyes.

There's a ringing in his ears. In his chest, like his heart's not too sure about this continued-beating business, overwhelmed.

"What the _hell,"_ Bucky says, "get _down,_ Steve, you idiot--!" and puts three rounds neatly into three robot attackers Steve hadn't even heard approaching. They fall down and short out and spit sparks. And, oh God, Bucky, _Bucky._

Bucky runs over--pausing to launch a flying kick that knocks another robot head off--and skids to a stop beside Steve, dust in his hair and on his boots, too thin and beautiful, and demands, "Don't just sit there, Steve, we gotta move!"

Steve manages, "Bucky..."

"Bucky, yeah, sure, if you want--" Pale eyes flick up and down, assessing, inspecting, protecting. "Can you get up?"

"Bucky..."

"Okay," Bucky says, now looking worried, and hurls another grenade. A big one. Between him and Thor, only maybe twenty robot threats left now. "The fuck's the rest of your team, Steve? They got somethin' better to do?"

"Bucky," Steve says, and something cracks open in his heart and on his face, like he needs to smile or laugh or cry. He's sitting atop broken asphalt breathing in robot-dust and San Francisco sea air, plopped on the ground on his ass and looking up, and Bucky's hair's coming loose from its bun and snarled in sunshine like a halo.

Bucky holds out a hand. Steve takes it. Lets himself be pulled to his feet.

Bucky says, "Someone's gotta watch your back, Steve, so I guess it's my job, like always, 'specially when you try to take on a robot army by your idiot self, what the fuck're you thinking," and doesn't let go of his hand, and Steve says, "Like always," and doesn't let go of _his_ hand either.

Tony lands, breathless and shoving his faceplate up. Thor wanders over too, hair on end and slightly frazzled. They both raise eyebrows. Steve and Bucky continue to mutually not let go.

 

At first it hadn't been conscious, this specific urge: it felt like the other one always had, the hook in the back of his brain tugging and shocking him from blank shutdown into cold and active duty. He could not put a name to it, and it didn't stop. The early days after the fall were splintered, cracked fragments of memory, the only consistent thing in his world being this _need_ to _complete the mission_ even though the mission briefing itself seemed inexplicably to have been wiped. He moved through the city in the dark, slowly becoming aware, slowly being able to use words inside his head again. Then the museum, and the vast specter of his own face--and his face reflected in the glass as it was now. Words. Steven Grant Rogers. Steve Rogers.

 _Steve_.

The splintered memory-dust in his head seemed suddenly to align, like iron filings in a radio coherer, and a signal passed across and was received.

Since then he has watched from safe cover while Captain America and his friends go into action, re-learning the way Steve moves, the way he fights. Three engagements. They're in San Francisco and it's Zola, he would be able to tell Zola's work from anybody else's in the world, and Zola's robots are making a hell of a mess out of the place and Bucky, because he is sometimes Bucky now in his own head, is watching as Howard Stark's son and an improbable mythological figure and Steve beat the crap out of them, but...

...but there are too many, he can see that, he can see with the glassy clarity that was trained into him in two separate lifetimes that there are too many, and Steve is open, he's _open_ and they're swarming over the trolley behind him and Bucky does not think at all, does not consider or calculate or strategize: he's snatched the pin from a grenade and pitched it like a fastball into the middle of the clump of Zola's robots and there is the _crump_ and flare of an explosion.

He realizes only after he's done it that he has made his decision.

Steve's...still not taking cover, what the hell, what the _hell_ , and Bucky has to grab for the machine pistol on his back and drop three more of the fucking things, vaulting over a burnt-out Camry and taking a fourth out with a well-placed kick, before he can reach him. Time has stopped running in a linear flow: his awareness is hiccupping between a sepia-toned alleyway and a snowy sniper-nest and the glaring brilliance of sunlight on the Anacostia bridge and _here and now_ Steve Rogers looks into his eyes and knows him, and says, "Bucky?"

There are only inches between them now. Steve isn't moving, _fuck_ , had they got him, had he been too late after all?

"Bucky," he says again, and it feels like confirmation: Y/N?

_Y._

Time slots back into its ordinary flow and he is here, he is really here, he is really him, and they need to get the fuck off this street before any more of Zola's creations join the party. "Bucky, yeah, sure, if you want," he's saying, not really listening to himself. "Can you get up?" There are...okay, there _are_ more coming. He glances behind them and lobs another grenade into an approaching party, wondering where the hell the rest of the primary-colored team is supposed to be, why aren't they on Steve's six?

"Bucky," Steve says one more time, and he is not sure he can bear the expression on that fair, dusty, bleeding, above all _dear_ face: it wakes a totally unfamiliar tightness in his throat, a sting at the corners of his eyes. He reaches down with his good hand, seeing a flash of blue-grey rock and snow and a train for a moment, a terrible moment, before Steve's hand closes round his own. His skin is warm, and human, and real. There is dust in Steve's eyelashes and hair, his face is older than Bucky remembers, new lines drawn in it, but the smile is still the same sweet curved dimply smile that he remembers--and he _remembers_ , now. What he is for. What he has always been for: to watch Steve's back. Like always.

 

Bucky's looking at him like--

It's not an expression Steve can describe. He suspects it mirrors the one on his own face. Poleaxed, with a side of tremulous joy. Bucky's fingers're warm and alive. Bucky's eyes're slate-sky blue and exasperated and affectionate and also alive.

Tony says, "Hey, we're in San Francisco, anyone else feel like talking about this over Chinese, and by _this_ I mean not just Cap holding someone's hand but, y'know, that someone being the Winter Soldier."

Bucky, of all people, says, "The what?"

Steve blinks for a second, realizes--understanding that cuts like a knife, worse than the robot claws--and says, "It's okay, Buck, you don't have to remember..."

Bucky sighs. Familiar but with unfamiliar notes around the edges, ragged and recognizable. "I do. Remember. 's not what they called me. When they called me anything. Is that what you call me?"

Steve whispers, "No," like the desperation of valiant embers, like ash and blood on his mouth. "I call you Bucky."

Bucky nods, processing the information or confirmation, and then reaches over automatically to dab at Steve's split lip, and then stops because he's reaching with the metal hand, because the flesh-and-blood one's clutched in Steve's sweaty grip and Steve's not letting go in this lifetime, not until or unless Bucky asks.

The sunbeams, overhead, skitter restlessly through clouds. Weather patterns disturbed. Anxious.

They both consider the gesture. Steve holds entirely wholeheartedly still. Not afraid.

Bucky turns the reaching-out into a ginger and gradual touch, one metal fingertip brushing Steve's cheek. Feather-light through battle-grit and chilly curious sunshine.

Steve keeps on holding still, not wanting to splinter the dream. He doesn't know how much Bucky can feel, what sensors might be lighting up at the faintest whisper of metal over bare skin. He knows _he's_ feeling fearless and reckless and lighter than he's been since snow and a train and an outflung hand. Lightness inside his bones, hollow spaces ready and waiting to be filled up with happiness.

Bucky traces Steve's lips with one fascinated metal fingertip and it's Bucky touching him and it's Steve's pulse beating like mad butterfly-swarms of all the words he never got to say. It's a second chance and a first chance and they're gonna get it right this time, he thinks, because how can they not? Him and Bucky. They can take on the world.

 

He can feel a great deal more than one would think, with those bright silver fingertips. Heat and pressure. Not texture, not so much, but the warmth and yielding softness of Steve's lips

_lips were soft: had he known that before, and forgotten it, or is it wholly new?_

and the faint sigh of Steve's breath fogging the mirror-finish in little feather-touches as he holds perfectly, perfectly still. Bucky thinks incoherently that if he has had to go through all his lifetimes of pain and horror and death and waste and ruin to get here, to stand here under the sun like this with Steve Rogers' face cupped in his hand and Steve Rogers looking at him, into him, like this: it was worth it. The eyes are the same, through all that ice: Steve's eyes, blue and clear with that darker ring around the iris he has always thought makes them look like little blue crystal bowls curved to take in light. They're the same eyes that looked at him out of a desperately thin face, so long ago: _I can make it on my own._

 _The point is_ , Bucky thinks, now, a lifetime away, _the point is and always has been: you don't have to._

 

"Steve," Bucky says finally, hushed like he's exploring the word and all its resonances.

"Yeah, okay," Tony grumbles in the background, "he's Steve, and you brought grenades, for which thank you, by the way, I can see I'm the only one remembering manners around here, and you're not even listening, are you, okay, just keep touching each other, don't mind us." Thor announces, "I would be proud to call the friend of Steve Rogers a fellow brother-in-arms." The sun pops out, with flawless narrative timing, to sparkle off the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.

"Guess I might have to stick around," Bucky says, lifting his metal hand away but not stepping back, no distance between them, flesh-and-blood fingers remaining tangled with Steve's, "if you're gonna take all the stupid risks you can ever think up."

Steve forces out through his choked-up throat, "So if I take all the stupid risks, you're gonna stick around?"

"Not sure that was exactly my point," Bucky says, but he's grinning a little, small and surprised like he never expected to remember how. " 's what I do, though, right? My mission."

"Your _mission..._ "

 _"My_ mission," Bucky says, and this time Steve hears the emphasis on the pronoun, _that_ pronoun. It's surreal. It's _real_. Defined in clear-as-day new-beginning taste and sight and sound: his split lip and the mangled robot limbs and the blue of the Pacific Ocean and that beloved voice adding hesitantly, "Sorry about your shoulder."

"Huh? Oh..." He'd forgotten about that ache. He wriggles it. Eighty-six percent healed. He says, "I'm good, Buck," and knows that he is. "You?" And Bucky, hand in his, nods.


End file.
